Monday, July 21, 2008

FTP news: Threads and Windows

Development proceeded, but I did not announce anything since the code was too buggy. Two were the areas of change since the ancient 0.1 release: threads and socket core.

I want FTP to have a worker thread during file transfers, else the user interface is unresponsive, which is barely acceptable on the Macintosh and unusable on GNUstep, where there wasn't even a progress refresh. My first attempts called the gui from the worker threads which gave problems on GNUstep. Now with DO, the controller separation is need and works very well.

I rewrote the core data transfer mechanism, which previously was in typical BSD style where sockets where used as standard files, which a more portable recv() approach. Together with some tweaks and macros this means that socket operations work on Windows!